


Three Grilled Cheeses Coulson Has Made

by RowboatCop



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Coulson cooking, Coulson has been shaped by the women in his life, Coulson opening up to Skye, Coulson's working class background, F/M, Fluff, Food as Comfort, Grilled Cheese, coulson feels, skoulsonfest2k15redux
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 08:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4384370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowboatCop/pseuds/RowboatCop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Does what it says on the tin. </p>
<p>Skoulsonfest2k15redux, Day 1: Junk Food. Yes, I have a mild obsession with Coulson and grilled cheese, but I feel like I'm entitled since my grilled cheese thing predates the grilled cheese on the show.  :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Grilled Cheeses Coulson Has Made

1.

It’s the first food he learns how to cook.

His Grandma — his dad’s mother — teaches him in the kitchen one day after school, when he expresses an interest in learning about what it is she makes for him most days. (More days than she probably should.)

He’s seven years old and finishing the second grade, and in between ball games and riding his bike through the small neighborhood with the other kids, he spends most of his time with her. His parents bought their small three bedroom home in large part because it’s just two blocks from her house, and she walks to the elementary school every day to meet young Phillip. They walk back to her house, past his parents’ house, which will be empty until his father finishes football practice and his mother is done with her shift at the hospital.

(Only recently have his parents sold his old nursery furniture from the third bedroom and allowed it to become a sort of all purpose junk room, a move he will later understand as an abandonment of hope. It also coincides with his father’s decision to purchase the battered remains of a Corvette that’s not old enough to look as bad as it does.)

Just like every other day, they walk into the kitchen to get a snack, but unlike every other day, he doesn’t sit down at the table when she tells him he’ll fix his sandwich.

“I want to do it,” he tells her, mostly because he wants to be able to do most things by himself lately.

“Once you learn, you’re going to have to make me sandwiches,” she warns him.

“Okay,” he agrees after a moment of contemplation, as though this was a serious negotiation and not teasing. He definitely doesn't mind making his grandma sandwiches.

She grins at him, though — the smile that means she’s proud of him — and helps him push a small step stool up to the stove.

Together, they pull out slices of Wonderbread, layer on sliced cheddar cheese, and then spread the outsides of each sandwich with mayonnaise that sizzles when dropped onto the hot cast iron skillet.

“Very carefully,” she repeats, voice soft and never sharp, as she guides him through flipping the sandwiches.

They come out perfect, and the next day he does it without her help, a proud smile on his face as he sets a perfect grilled cheese on the kitchen table for her.

 

* * *

 

Skye is causing earthquakes.  

His team are all terrified — even in May, he can see the cracks around the edges — and Skye has locked herself up and _Skye is causing earthquakes_.

Coulson can’t even process his own feelings about this, like they’re locked up tight somewhere in his chest, classified even from him. It’s a defense mechanism plain and simple — he knows this, understands it rationally, but in the moment all he can feel is numb.

So he’s making the motions to put her on the Index (because what else is he supposed to do) and trying to keep calm enough that no one could say he’s treating Skye any different than another person on the Index (except he is, of course he is, because _she is Skye_ ). But it’s all motions, all reflexes at this point.

Which is where the grilled cheese comes from. Like a comfort reflex.

And it _is_ a reflex because he doesn’t make this for other people. He has more complex panini recipes that he makes for other people, things that are supposed to be objectively better than cheddar cheese on white sandwich bread.

Objectively better, but somehow not right now.

He uses Hunter’s white bread, layers it with cheddar cheese, and spreads the outside of the slices with mayonnaise. It seasons the bread as it cooks, and he’s not particularly proud of the fact that the secret ingredient of this recipe is mayonnaise, but it works. Well.

And it tastes like...like life before he knew how bad life could be. Like comfort and his grandma’s kitchen.

Like something he needs, and like something he wants to share with Skye.

 

2.

After his father dies, his mother decides to move back to be near her family, and at first they move in with her mother. Being in Wisconsin, being in a small town where everyone knows her and what happened, is too much. Plus, she’s able to get a better job in Boston — a bigger hospital with more shifts and higher pay.

Of course, it’s not what he wants, but he learns quickly that everything can’t be about what he wants. He learns that lesson younger than a kid probably should.

Once they’ve moved, his mother works double shifts almost every day, and he spends a lot of time with his grandmother — his mother’s mother.

She’s more formal than his grandma — proper in the way someone from a big city seems to a boy raised in a town where the high school football coach was a public figure — but not cold by any stretch.

In fact, she’s completely tickled to have him around her home over the summer before he starts fifth grade.

So when he asks, she makes him a grilled cheese.

It is...not what he’s expecting, but Phillip has already learned that things can’t always be the way he wants them.

For one thing, his grandmother uses a dense brown bread instead of the airy Wonderbread, and her cheese is rubbery, individually wrapped yellow squares. Instead of mayonnaise (she doesn’t buy mayonnaise), she drops the sandwich into a hot pan coated with melted butter.

It grows on him, especially when his grandmother has a stroke the next year and winds up in a nursing home. The night after they settle her in there, he makes dinner for his mother — grilled cheese with brown bread and American singles and melted butter in a hot pan.

He likes feeling useful, likes doing something for her, and she likes her sandwiches this way — with the melty fake cheese and butter instead of mayonnaise.

They sit quietly together in the small kitchen, too quiet now that it's just the two of them, now that there are even more complications in their lives, and it’s the first time he’s made her dinner, but it will be far from the last.

 

* * *

 

“You need to eat,” he tells her as he tries to guide her towards the table just off to the side of the kitchen, “I’ll make you something.” The rest of the team needs to eat, too, probably, but no one would ever accuse him of treating everyone the same.

“Yeah,” she agrees, “grilled cheese.” But she doesn’t sit down, instead follows him into the kitchen.

“Skye,” he sighs her name, “you should rest.”

She _does_ need to rest — she’s visibly exhausted, and with as much as she used her powers in the fight, she’s got to be famished.

“And pass up the chance to finally learn the secret ingredient to your grilled cheese?”

He laughs and opens the fridge, taking stock of ingredients. They’re out of real cheese, but Hunter and Fitz share a proclivity for the American singles, so there’s a package there that Simmons likes to frown at. The sprouted whole grain bread is probably Simmons’s, but it also has more nutritional value than the white stuff, and he’ll buy more.

“Three?” He asks Skye, pulling out six slices of bread. She needs to eat a lot.

“Four,” she decides, looking sort of self conscious about it, but he’ll make her four grilled cheese sandwiches if that’s what she needs to recover from saving the world. He doesn’t want her to be self conscious about it, just wants to feed her.

Butter, cheese, and bread in hand, they move towards the stove so he can begin heating the butter in their largest skillet.

Skye gets suspicious, though, when he begins peeling back the wrappers of the cheese slices, only slightly difficult as he’s adjusting to the fine motor control in his prosthesis.

“There’s no way you use fake cheese on your sandwiches.”

“Not usually, no,” he agrees. He usually makes them with cheddar — and, often, other ingredients, too. “This is how my mother liked them, though.”

It makes her smile.

“Your mother taught you this?”

“Her mother, actually,” he corrects her as he unwraps the last slice of cheese.

“Little Phil learned how to cook from his grandmother?”

He can feel himself blush — his face and ears turn hot.

“Both of them,” he tells her, “we lived in the same neighborhood as my father’s mother in Wisconsin…”

And he tells her about his childhood as he drops her sandwiches onto the skillet, familiar feeling of pride, of being happy that he can do at least this one thing for someone he loves.

 

3.

“This is pretty fancy for grilled cheese, Phil,” Audrey tells him. “I thought you were going to make me something boring but comforting that goes with tomato soup, like my mom would make when I was sick.”

She sounds relieved.

Truthfully, it hadn’t even occurred to him to make her the boring kind of grilled cheese, the kind his grandmothers made, the kind his mother liked, the kind he ate in childhood.

He so rarely eats them, anyways, now that he’s discovered artisan breads and fancy cheeses and a panini press. Mayonnaise and American cheese and Wonderbread have no place in his kitchen lately. Even butter is questionable, replaced by a tub of something that claims to be healthier.

“You’ll love it,” he promises her as the sandwiches finish cooking.

“I have no doubt,” Audrey replies, grinning at him from her seat on the counter.

Today, it’s fresh baked sourdough spread with fig preserves and then layered with brie, thinly sliced bosc pear, and a few grinds of smoked sea salt and pepper. He presses the sandwiches in the lightly oiled press and serves them with red wine, at a table set with tapered candles and cloth napkins.

It’s a far cry from his childhood grilled cheese, something he’s learned to think of as _better_ than his childhood grilled cheese.

At the table, she makes almost obscene moans as she eats, and this is something he likes about Audrey — she’s so easily impressed by seemingly everything about him, it makes him feel like he’s a good man, even when he sometimes worries that maybe he isn’t. They’ve only seen each other a few times since Marcus Daniels was put away, but he likes her — he thinks this could maybe go somewhere.

“You know, women love men who cook,” Audrey tells him.

“I’ve heard that,” he agrees, raising an eyebrow at her and going for flirty. He’s good at flirty.

“So you cook other things, too?”

“That’s classified,” he smirks at her, watches as she laughs at his lame G-man joke.

“I’d like to find out,” she tells him, suddenly serious, less flirty.

“I’d like to show you,” he answers. And he hasn’t had a girlfriend in a long time, hasn’t had to navigate these stupid boundaries between work and home, between Phil and Agent Coulson. But he thinks he can manage it. Probably.

 

* * *

 

“Ooohhh, I get the fancy grilled cheese today,” Skye teases as she walks into the kitchen, hair wet from her post-mission shower, just as Coulson is closing her sandwiches between the panini press.

“I thought you might like something different.”

“Just different? Not better?”

“Just different,” he agrees. Because maybe he’s learned that there’s a place for his mayo slathered white bread and a little American cheese sometimes.

She grins at him like he’s said just the right thing, and he loves this about Skye — that he tries constantly, tries to be a better person, tries to be the person that will impress her. Even if it’s just trying to open up, trying to be more flexible, trying to let her in.

And she appreciates it, always, every little thing he tries.

He gets a kiss for his trouble, soft and warm and still surprising, still so new that he can’t believe it’s real.

In response, he drops his spatula and slides his arms low around her waist, perhaps too eager, but Skye doesn’t mind. She seems to like his eagerness, seems to relish in his desire to touch her and hold her.

She parts her lips under his, lets him feel her tongue brush against his, and he would lift her onto the counter to continue things except that her stomach growls between them.

“You need to eat,” he whispers against her lower lip.

“Uh huh,” she agrees, though she kisses along his jaw instead of pulling back. “I can kiss you after?”

“All you want,” he agrees, pretty happy with that arrangement, and lifts the lid of the panini press to see the perfect dark lines crossing her bread, a bit of fig and brie trying to drip out of one side of a sandwich.


End file.
